Open-source Amazon EC2 alternatives

Ubicloud is an open-source cloud platform designed to run on any infrastructure, described by its authors as an open alternative to cloud providers in the way Linux is to proprietary operating systems. It delivers infrastructure-as-a-service capabilities on top of bare-metal hosts, for example Hetzner, Leaseweb and AWS Bare Metal.

Its services include elastic compute, non-replicated block storage, firewalls and load balancers, managed Postgres, Kubernetes, AI inference and IAM. A control plane takes leased bare-metal Linux machines, prepares them for cloud use, and then lets you provision and manage resources through a cloud console. The project is written in Ruby and topics also mention GitHub Actions runners.

You can use the managed platform at console.ubicloud.com without installing anything, where the underlying provider's price and location benefits are passed on to you, or build your own cloud by leasing servers and running the control plane yourself. Ubicloud is licensed under AGPL-3.0. The quick-start flow is currently described for Hetzner machines running Ubuntu 24.04.

KubeVirt is an add-on that brings virtual machine management to Kubernetes. Its aim is to give virtualization solutions a shared foundation on top of Kubernetes, so that workloads that need a full virtual machine can run in the same cluster as containers.

KubeVirt extends Kubernetes by adding virtualization resource types, especially the VM type, through Custom Resource Definitions. This lets the Kubernetes API manage VMs alongside all other resources. That functionality does not go into Kubernetes itself; instead KubeVirt supplies extra controllers and agents that run on an existing cluster. Through these, a VM can be declaratively created from a predefined definition, scheduled onto the cluster, launched, stopped and deleted.

KubeVirt is written in Go and licensed under Apache-2.0. The project provides a quickstart, user documentation, a blog, a YouTube channel and developer documentation covering architecture, components and the API reference.

Incus manages system containers and virtual machines. It gives a single, unified way to run and manage full Linux systems inside either, with images for many Linux distributions, including official Ubuntu images and community-provided ones.

It is built around a REST API and runs anywhere from a lone instance on one host to a cluster that fills a data center rack, so it can serve both development and production workloads. The README describes it as a way to set up something that feels like a small private cloud, and suggests it for people who want to containerize different environments, run virtual machines or manage infrastructure cost-effectively. A try-it page lets you test Incus online.

Incus began as a community fork of LXD, made after Canonical took over that project from the Linux Containers community, and it is maintained by the same developers who first created LXD. It is written in Go, has no contributor license agreement and remains under the Apache 2.0 licence.

Harvester is a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform built on Kubernetes. It runs on bare-metal servers and combines virtualization with distributed storage, giving operators a cloud-native alternative to traditional virtualization stacks that relies on direct-attached local storage instead of complex external SANs.

Harvester ships as a bootable appliance image that can be installed from an ISO or automatically through iPXE scripts. Virtual machines can be created, edited, cloned and deleted with SSH key injection, cloud-init and console access, moved between hosts with live migration, and backed up to NFS, S3 or NAS targets for later restore. Storage management covers distributed block storage and tiering, and networking supports virtual IPs and multiple network cards.

Because it uses the Kubernetes API as a common automation layer for container and VM workloads, and integrates with Rancher to support containerized environments, it can unify older virtualized infrastructure with container adoption from core to edge locations. Harvester is written in Go and licensed under Apache-2.0.

LXD manages full Linux systems running inside system containers or virtual machines, giving a unified way to run and manage both. It supports images for many Linux distributions, including official Ubuntu images and community-provided ones, and is built around a REST API.

It scales from a single instance on one machine to a cluster spanning a data center rack, so it is used for both development and production workloads. The result is something that feels like a small private cloud, where different workloads can run efficiently while resource use stays optimized. The README suggests it for containerizing separate environments, running VMs, and managing infrastructure cost-effectively.

The LXD daemon runs only on Linux, but the lxc client tool is available on most platforms, installable through Snap, Chocolatey or Homebrew. LXD is written in Go, maintained by Canonical and licensed under AGPL-3.0, with documentation and release announcements published online.

Apache CloudStack is open source software for deploying and managing large networks of virtual machines as a highly available, scalable infrastructure-as-a-service cloud. Service providers use it to offer public cloud services, while companies use it for private on-premises clouds or as part of a hybrid setup. It is written mainly in Java and Python.

The project describes it as a turnkey solution that includes the full stack most organizations want from an IaaS cloud: compute orchestration, network-as-a-service, user and account management, resource accounting, a complete native API and a user interface. Administrators can manage the cloud through a web interface, command-line tools or a query-based API.

CloudStack supports a range of hypervisors, including VMware vSphere, KVM, XenServer, XenProject and Hyper-V, as well as OVM and LXC containers. Topics also mention Kubernetes, XCP-ng and libvirt. It is an Apache Software Foundation project licensed under Apache-2.0, with documentation, a demo, news and events pages and security reporting procedures on its website.